OpenACC Announces New Platform Support and Membership Growth

By DE Editors

The OpenACC standards group announced an increase in compliant products, increasing membership, and new platform support.

OpenACC is a programming standard for parallel computing using directives, designed to enable scientists to take advantage of computing systems equipped with heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems.

“2012 was an outstanding year of growth for OpenACC,” said Duncan Poole, president of the OpenACC standards group. “All of the founding members shipped products compliant to the OpenACC standard, key labs and research organizations signed up as members and developers achieved significant benefit from the portability and performance of the OpenACC directives model.”

Notable among the recent applications that have benefited from OpenACC programming:

Using the CAPS enterprise OpenACC compiler on an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU accelerator, PROMES French Laboratory accelerated by 19X its Heat Transfer Ray-Tracing application in comparison to porting with Sandy Bridge. As a consequence, PROMES is able to efficiently and accurately simulate the entire heat transfer, radiative and convective, in order to design and validate a new prototype.

Researchers at the University of Bristol are experimenting with parallelizing a Lattice Boltzmann code used for simulating fluid flows. Using OpenACC via the PGI 12.8 compiler, running on a Kepler-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX680 GPU, a 14.5X speedup occurred over scalar OpenMP parallel code running on four cores of an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU.

Cray scientists working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory porting the turbulent combustion code S3D achieved improved scaling on the recently announced Titan supercomputer. The port consisted of refactoring S3D into a hybrid application consisting of MPI, OpenMP and OpenACC.

At the SC12 even this month, members demonstrated OpenACC support for accelerators from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. “Flexibility across multiple platforms while giving options of vendors is one of the key benefits to programming with OpenACC,” said Thomas Schulthess, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center. “OpenACC provides support and efficiency for programming heterogeneous HPC systems, including all major architectures used in parallel computing today. OpenACC significantly enhances productivity of those scientists who need to migrate legacy software onto modern computing systems.”

During 2012, the founding members (CAPS, Cray, PGI and NVIDIA) were joined by Allinea, Georgia Tech, Oak Ridge National Labs, Rogue Wave and University of Houston. Other new members include CSCS and Sandia National Labs.